I contacted Adobe support and an engineer was able to help me
solve this. I am using a Mac OS X version 10.4.11. In my case, it
was a problem font in my user fonts. I went to user:Library:Fonts
and moved that font folder to a new folder with a different name.
Then after I restarted my computer, Fireworks opened. Now if I feel
a need for the user fonts I disabled, I will reinstall them one at
a time and see if Fireworks still opens until I find the culprit
font. I hope I don't have to restart my computer each time I
reinstall a font to see if Fireworks still opens, but I might have
to.

quote:
Originally posted by:
MontyCI contacted Adobe support and an engineer was able to help me
solve this. In my case, it was a problem font in my user fonts. I
went to user:Library:Fonts and moved that font folder to a new
folder with a different name. Then after I restarted my computer,
Fireworks opened. Now if I feel a need for the user fonts I
disabled, I will reinstall them one at a time and see if Fireworks
still opens until I find the culprit font. I hope I don't have to
restart my computer each time I reinstall a font to see if
Fireworks still opens, but I might have to.

I've got 3717 fonts on my laptop and I really don't have the
time to be able to search through them all and get rid of stuff.
Does anyone have an idea as to what font(s) or font family/families
are causing the internal error ??

quote:
Originally posted by:
SliferXI've got 3717 fonts on my laptop and I really don't have the
time to be able to search through them all and get rid of stuff.
Does anyone have an idea as to what font(s) or font family/families
are causing the internal error ??

Oh and by the way, I'm using windows vista home premium sp1

No, not yet.

No one knows for certain if the fonts are the only problem
and then which fonts are causing this.

> No one knows for certain if the fonts are the only
problem and then
> which fonts are causing this.

Go to the C:\Windows\fonts folder and view details. Sort the
view by
file size and check for any fonts with a zero byte size. If
you find
any, delete them. Those fonts are corrupted. You can also
test for
corrupt fonts in Mac or Windows by using Font Agent.

I don't have any fonts that are zero bytes in size, but I
have one that is 10MB, the only other fonts with large file sizes
are the adobe named fonts. Also, this particular font shows up as
FangSong in the fonts folder, yet its actual filename is
simfang.ttf and also its font type says Open Type.

Could it be this font that is causing me my problems ??

EDIT: I have also found some other fonts that have a font
type as Open Type yet the file names have the extension .ttf

EDIT 2: I also have a three fonts that have their font types
listed as Type 1, where two of them are 1KB in size and the other
is 14KB in size. Thats if there is anything wrong with them.

I had this problem for a while (since installing the trial)
and this seems to have hit gold. I used Font Manager 3.5 to
"Uninstall all fonts not supplied with Windows". No restart needed,
and it works fine. (Down from 700s to 100s).

quote:
Originally posted by:
The InhibitorI had this problem for a while (since installing the trial)
and this seems to have hit gold. I used Font Manager 3.5 to
"Uninstall all fonts not supplied with Windows". No restart needed,
and it works fine. (Down from 700s to 100s).

Sorry, I was too lazy to isolate an individual problem.

I can confirm this same procedure worked for me also - used
Font Manager to uninstall all but the Windows System Fonts and
Fireworks started up fine after exhibiting the same problems. We
may have a winner, now when will we see a patch that fixes this??

Seems to be an error in the way fireworks reads some fonts,
the best option I can provide is go through and delete all
non-essential system fonts from "C:/Windows/Fonts/" and restore
them in groups, it was easiest for me to narrow it by restoring
single letters of the alphabet at the same time. Seems that a
TI(Texas Instruments) Calculator font file was causing me the
trouble. I suppose it will be different on other machines as
everyone has their own fonts!

*EDIT*

Fireworks doesn't limit you to 1024 fonts, I have had over
3500+ fonts installed at once and fireworks ran just fine, just
took me forever to go through the list!

All I did was download and install Font Manager 4, the Trial
version. Then I ran it on Vista as an Administrator, and followed
the steps in the Quick Guide.pdf (I don't know the exact name of
the file). Then after importing all the fonts I hit OK and it asked
to restart my computer, so I did. After it restarted I tried
Fireworks and it worked.

Don't ask me how I got it to work because that is all I did
and nothing else. I was just about to uninstall all my Adobe
products and run the scripts but something told me to try again.
Thank you "something".

Thanks everyone for the post in this. I had the exact same
problem and downloaded a font manager. It found corrupted fonts
that would not allow Fireworks to open. I bought the full CS4 Web
Developer package for close to $1000 bucks, the support call center
was not much help. It amazes me how someone could charge that much
for software and it have problems with a corrupt font that keeps it
from opening and does not give you much of a debug message. I was
just lucky to find this topic.

Exact same problem. I have Design Premium CS3 (no Fireworks)
and decided to trial Web Premium CS4 (has Fireworks). Got the trial
version 01/12/08, installed it same day. Today, I thought I'd check
out the programs that didn't come with DP CS3. So far so good
except Fireworks. Thanks to this forum I moved all my fonts except
the essentials and now Fireworks opens. Appears it is definitely a
font problem. Now which one? I don't collect fonts so they were
either installed with MS office 2007 or with the CS3/CS4 package.
None of the fonts mentioned so far here were on my PC.

No need to run cleanscript for CS3 or CS4 (yet). I did not
have to uninstall any Adobe products or reinstall the trial CS4. I
simply copied my fonts into a backup file and then deleted every
font in C:\WINDOWS\fonts that wasn't required to run the Windows XP
OS. No need to reboot. I reinitialized Fireworks and it finished
without incident.

Now if anyone, like Adobe, could tell me which font(s) is
causing the problem, I'd appreciate it. In the meantime:
1. I'm not keen on paying for a known problem. After my trial
is up I'll be talking to Adobe about what they plan to do to fix
this. Otherwise, I may be very content not to upgrade. The rest of
the CS4 suite will have to give me some positive experience to
balance out the Fireworks fiasco.
2. I'll be systematically testing which font(s) causes the
error and report back. I hope I can find the problem before my 30
days are up! ;-).

further edit: I informed Adobe of the bug. I also noticed
that Fireworks initialization crashed at the same place while
trying to load "styles".

01.14.09 Update: There has been some mention on other
fireworks forum threads that the font TI-86.TTF is the culprit. I
have found this to be true in my case. I have only 673 fonts and
only TI-86.TFF caused Fireworks not to initialize. All the other
fonts, including other TI (Texas Instrument) fonts, did not cause
any error to occur.

01.15.09 Update: I installed the trial software on my second
(office) PC that has allot of technical software on it. In this
instance, after installation, I removed the TI-86.TFF font before
initializing any Adobe CS4 software. I then started Fireworks
first. It initialized without any problems. The difference in the
amount of fonts is small maybe around 750 fonts on my office PC
with the additional being from ESRI. OS is WXP SP3.

I've had the same problem for some months since installing
CS4. I used a piece of software called FontExpert (
http://www.proximasoftware.com/fontexpert)
to narrow down which font it was out of my 1152 installed fonts. In
my case it turned out to be:

"Medway light SF" with a file name of rochl.ttf, uninstalled
it and Fireworks worked fine.

I've had the same problem for some months since installing
CS4. I used a piece of software called FontExpert (
http://www.proximasoftware.com/fontexpert)
to narrow down which font it was out of my 1152 installed fonts. In
my case it turned out to be:

"Medway light SF" with a file name of rochl.ttf, uninstalled
it and Fireworks worked fine.

Hope this saves somebody some time.

All the best
Justin Nye
GrippleSpider.com

FontExpert is not finding any damaged fonts but still I can't
run Fw CS4.

Keep FontExpert open then select a group of fonts, say All
those beginning with A and Unistall to a Group.
Try starting Fireworks,
If it fails, close the dialog, switch back to Font Expert and
Delete the 'B''s
Try starting Fireworks...
Continue until it loads, then you know the group where the
font is that fails and can whittle it down from there.

An updater is being planned for Adobe Fireworks CS4 which will address the text bounding box jumping issues. The issue of internal error on startup due to various reasons is also being targeted from this patch. The patch is in a soon to be released stage.

I had the same promlem using Windows Vista. I re installed 2 times, no previous beta on the machine. Nothing worked. I was so fed up and needed to work that I purchased my first MAC. I sure hope it doesn't happen again like it did to the person above!

I use Fireworks every day! Until I saw this thread I thought it was mt "sick" PC:-)

Thanks for the tip. I found the file on my computer but it was not zero bytes in size; it was 34Kb. I tried renaming it anyway, but that didn't rid the Fireworks boot error. The Fireworks patch did work however!

You had the "golden touch" with providing us the link to the Fireworks patch. I realize the installation of any piece of software is likely to result in a slightly different configuration of files (executables, drivers, etc.) on each computer onto which it is installed, but the Fireworks patch did the trick for me! I read your posting this morning and downloaded the patch. It was a quick install and Fireworks CS4 booted up on my first try. Thanks a whole bunch. I wish I had found your post two weeks ago when I first installed the CS4 suite and encountered the Fireworks problem; i.e., every program in the suite booted fine except Fireworks.

I am having the same problem on a brand new computer with only OfficeMac 2008 installed on it. This is obviously a bigger problem that Adobe is refusing to accept. I have spent a total of 4 days (2 hours each day) on the phone with them and nothing has fixed the problem. They obviously don't know what's going on either.

I am still suspecting it to be a problem related to fonts installed on the system. The patch tried to address this issue incase there is a corrupted font or unreadable font. However I feel that there are some exceptions to this and the patch is unable to handle it.

After going through my Fonts folder (Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard), I tracked it down to two fonts:

Song.dfontSeoul.dfont

Song caused an error on startup, and Seoul caused an error when I quit. These are also the only two fonts with the "dfont" extension, so I'm guessing that has something to do with it. Fireworks is back to normal now, and I hope this helps solve the problem for other users too.